Smart Community Readiness

Are you ready to take on a smart community initiative?

Make sure with SNG’s Smart Community Readiness Assessment

An increasing number of communities are taking advantage of digital infrastructure and transformation to deliver innovative enhanced essential services for the benefit of its residents. These solutions are wide-ranging under the umbrella of smart community services and are driven by a number of factors – some urgent and immediate (lowering costs) and others as part of a longer-term strategy (economic growth) that supports the inevitable changes in a digital world.

While there is no single smart community strategy that fits every community, a few things are clear:

Not just for large cities – Smart community solutions can benefit communities and regions of any size, depending on the need and scaleability to make an economic case to justify the investment.

It is a collaborative effort – Smart city solutions benefit the entire community with all of its varied constituents and stakeholders, many of whom are implicit partners in defining and delivering the services.

Digital infrastructure is a key – Whatever network technologies are used they must be ubiquitous and unconstrained to support the evolution of smart city applications – now and in the future.

Leadership is essential – Municipal leaders need to own the vision for their smart city and champion this across the entire community.

Whatever the scale of smart community implementation you may be considering, engaging and involving all constituents of your community will ensure that you are doing the right things at the right time in the right way for the right reasons. Engaging community stakeholders early gets this process started and ensures that you are ready to take the steps needed to succeed in achieving your goals.

SNG’s Smart Community Readiness Assessment

SNG’s Smart Community Readiness Assessment builds on our proven methodology, research, and identification of readiness success factors for smart community initiatives. The assessment is designed to be relevant and understandable by community stakeholders who are important to, or affected by the smart community initiative, regardless of their background. You don’t need to be a technology expert to participate in the readiness assessment.

The purpose of the assessment is to gauge to what extent the community has taken the necessary steps to prepare for success. Different stakeholder participants may have different views or awareness in some areas and, in fact, that is what you need since they are all affected. The readiness assessment provides an objective, structured method to get everyone on the same page about what it takes to be ready and it reveals areas where there is agreement – for better or worse – and areas where there may be a divergence of views.

The results of the assessment should be shared with all stakeholder participants to facilitate discussions of steps needed to be fully prepared to take on the smart community challenges. This is a key step in the process of achieving successful outcomes for your community’s future.

Critical Factors for Smart Community Readiness:

Leadership

Commitment of community leadership through all stages of the project.

Vision and Plan

Clarity of smart community vision and plan.

Organizational Stability

Ability to follow through on a smart community initiative over the timeframe.

Community Awareness

Awareness and support of citizens, businesses, and stakeholders.

Implementation Ability

The availability of resource capacity to follow through.

Market Profile

Understanding of the community of users and demand for enhanced essential services (smart community services).

Technology Capacity

Understanding of the state of existing technologies within organizations and across the community

The topics are organized into several distinct readiness criteria with plain language response options and may be completed online. Once all invited stakeholders have participated, the lead organization will receive a report with the results of each category that can be shared with participants to provide a framework for further discussion and collaboration.

Let’s Get Started – contact us to start your Smart Community Readiness Assessment

The Smart Community Readiness Pre-Assessment provides scoring to help you see how prepared your community is to achieve success in a smart community initiative. It takes just a few minutes to complete and you will immediately receive a scored summary report by email. SNG’s readiness assessments are based on lessons learned and successes of other communities.

Once you receive your complimentary Readiness Pre-Assessment Report, you can share the process and results from scoring with your elected officials and local leaders. Having them take the full Smart Community Readiness Assessment enables them to see whether they are in alignment, where there are gaps, and the process builds buy-in to your community’s broadband initiative.

Try it now for free!

Our Smart Community Readiness Pre-Assessment is totally FREE for you to use. We only require your contact information to ensure that this valuable tool is used for legitimate purposes by smart community proponents. We will send your access to the email address you provide.